Dear Financial Influencers, Please Stop

Amanda Claypool
10 min readJun 15, 2023
Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Back in 2019, I started a personal finance blog. I decided to call it Millionaire by Next Year. I thought by starting a blog I would finally find success as an entrepreneur.

Four years later, I’m nowhere closer to becoming a millionaire. And I’m beginning to wonder whether or not the “successful” bloggers I followed when I got started are actually making the amount of money they claim they do.

What I gained during that period of time, instead, is a wealth of knowledge. I learned how to build my own website. Write content. And even got a couple of articles to organically rank on Google without doing any SEO.

I want to keep the project going — to prove to myself I can build a successful blog — but I don’t have the heart anymore.

At some point in the journey, I realized the goal of a personal finance blog isn’t to show off your writing talent. It’s to sell products.

That’s the business I had gotten myself into. Not writing. Sales.

That wouldn’t be a terrible proposition if I believed in the products I was supposed to be selling. But I didn’t then and I still don’t now.

I may write a lot but I’m not a content mill trying to rank for an undervalued keyword. I can’t with good conscious continue writing that type of content for the…

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Amanda Claypool
Amanda Claypool

Written by Amanda Claypool

I write about the future of the world as it’s unfolding. Download my reading list: https://bit.ly/3xvJZf6

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